


Honesty Issues

by Tattered_Dreams



Category: Heartland (TV)
Genre: Chase Powers and Blair Connor are definitely topics they had to deal with, F/M, Honesty, I just wanted them to be less stubborn, Jack has a cameo, Relationship Discussions, Trust Issues, Veers off Canon during ep. 12 'Family Business', actual communication, also Spartan's there. he counts too, being broken up really wasnt working well for them, season 4, trying to be healthy and talk, what if, wow they had a lot of issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 15:26:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19793713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: “Amy?” Ashley asks, a ring of surprise in her voice as she spots her and Spartan the other side of Caleb’s truck. Ashley shifts, fingers twisting around each other and she glances uncomfortably over her shoulder. “Uh, what are you doing here?”“Being honest,” Amy says. “Is Ty here?”...What if, before Lou came to talk about the nursery, Amy decided she'd had enough of repeating mistakes. Not telling each other things broke them apart so Amy figures that's what they need to fix. Starting now.Season 4, ep 12 "Family Business", goes off-canon before the end of the episode.





	Honesty Issues

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written for Heartland in ten years and we will not be discussing the terrible fics that I did share from back then. I have recently been sucked back into the show, though, and am once again in awe over how very frustrating and stubborn Amy and Ty were. There have been a few passing moments where words and what-ifs have come to mind as I've watched, but nothing solid until this episode when this practically wrote itself in one evening.
> 
> So. In short. Just one of many opportunities in the early years that things could have gone differently. Picks up more-or-less directly after the second Ty/Amy scene in the barn discussing Chase's "reasons".
> 
> Hope you enjoy even if this is wildly outdated :)

_From now on, let’s be honest with each other._

How many times had they said that, though? Every time they fought? Whenever the smallest thing came up. And it was a repeating pattern; they withheld things, even the little ones, because...why? Because they didn’t think it was relevant, because they wanted to avoid the drama?

And it had gotten them here.

No. Amy’s done with it. Honesty; they agreed. Time to finally start learning from it. Maybe it wasn’t much, maybe it wouldn’t change things and maybe it really wasn’t Ty’s business at this point, but that was exactly the problem. It had to be worth trying.

Did she even brush him off earlier because she wanted to spare him, or because she was angry and anger was always easier when it could be thrown at someone else? Why was this one promise so hard for them to keep? If all it will cost her to uphold it is to actually stand still and give him the truth, then she’s going to do it.

She pushes herself off the bed springs creaking mordantly as she reaches for her boots. She jams them back on and rushes out of the room, skating right by a weary and harried looking Lou, not looking back even as her sister wheels on the spot.

“And where are you going in such a hurry?” Jack asks, eyeing her over his coffee cup as she peels through the kitchen.

She stops in the porch, momentum rocking her in place and she pulls in a breath, gazing out through the screen door. It’s all familiar; the veranda, the scrubby front yard and the dusty drive with the trucks lined by the fence; the looming shadow of the barn just visible at the very edge by the hinges. It’s been familiar all her life, but something about it feels lacking, empty, when she knows that Ty isn’t a part of it.

“To see Ty,” she says. “There’s – I just...I have to, Grandpa.”

Jack hums in his measured, considering way, unmoved from his calm recline against the sink. He swills the dregs of his coffee and then says, just as drawn out, “You can take the truck.”

Amy’s breath rushes out. It’s getting late, the sky touched with violet and overcast, and she hadn’t really stopped to consider it but she had been worried, just for a moment that he wouldn’t let her leave. “Thanks, Grandpa,” she says, “But I was going to take Spartan.”

She knows the offer for what it was; a blessing or support of her choice to go, and she’s grateful, but the thought of driving over to the trailer is an oddly cold one. If she takes Spartan, she won’t be alone, and no matter what comes of this, he’ll be there with her.

Jack nods, eyes soft and gentle like he understands exactly why. Amy manages a smile for him and pulls down her jacket from the hook.

“Amy,” he calls to her just as she reaches to push the screen door open. “Hold on.”

She stops, breathes, turns back even though there’s an urgent buzzing under her skin that says she’s wasted enough time already.

Jack's expression is quietly frank, a little sad. “Now you know I’m always on your side, but what’s going on with you two...well. I don’t think its just you hurting right now, you understand me?”

Her heart twists. She knows it isn’t. She heard the plea in Ty’s voice when he came to her in the barn, the armour that he pulled back on as he walked away. She saw his face, the fraught tension in his shoulders in the pool hall. She heard the exact words he didn’t say when he came to the barn the second time; the thick insinuation about just what Chase’s _reasons_ were.

She knows she’s not the only one mourning and upset, and she knows that Jack finds it hard to pick sides between them, that he probably always will.

“I do,” she says lowly.

Jack nods. “Just...keep it in mind. Ride safe.”

Amy ducks out of the door, and hears his parting words as it clatters shut behind her, “And make sure you’re home by eleven!”

.

The little drive outside the trailer on Ashley and Caleb’s lot is packed already. Caleb’s truck takes up most of the room even without the goose-neck trailer hitched. Ashley’s car is parked on an angle and Ty’s pick up is fitted on behind it. There barely would have been room for Jack’s truck as well.

Amy coaxes Spartan down from his easy loping stride, sitting deep as he drops into a trot for three steps. They leave the long grass and his hooves crunch through the stones and sand of the drive before he halts smartly with his hocks tucked in. He shakes his head, working the linked bit in his mouth as Amy catches the saddle horn and swings herself down to the ground.

The sound of his approach must have been loud enough to get through the trailer’s thin walls, because she’s barely finished looping his split rein around the gate rail near Shorty’s stable when the door swings open.

“Amy?” Ashley asks, a ring of surprise in her voice as she spots her and Spartan the other side of Caleb’s truck. Ashley shifts, fingers twisting around each other and she glances uncomfortably over her shoulder. “Uh, what are you doing here?”

“Being honest,” Amy says. “Is Ty here?”

“Um-” Ashley stalls, glancing back again.

“You know what,” Amy says, because she didn’t come here to put Ashley or Caleb in the middle of it. She pats Spartan and then ducks under his neck to approach the deck. “If he is then I need to talk to him. Please. If he’s not, or if he says he’s not, that’s okay. I’ll just sit out here until he’s back.”

Ashley hesitates, blinking, and the tension bleeds out of her shoulders. Something caught between sympathy and pride crosses her face, and she smiles. “Sure. Feel free to borrow the blanket. Uh. I’ll just….see if he’s here.”

Amy manages a smile back. “Thanks, Ashley.”

Ashley nods at her and turns to duck back inside.

Amy barely takes a step towards the sunken couch on the decking when the door swings open again and Ty appears. She freezes halfway between him and Spartan, and now that he’s actually standing in front of her again, she can feel her throat close up. Maybe that’s part of why even the little things were always so hard. It’s terrifying, the thought of standing in front of someone she loves so much and opening up everything about herself and her own vulnerabilities; entrusting those fragile parts in someone else’s hands and heart.

Ty looks worn. Tiredness lingers around his eyes and it’s clear he hasn’t shaved in a few days, but his shoulders are a tight line. His arms are braced even though his hands are in the pockets of his padded parka, and there’s a muscle feathering in his jaw as he swallows.

“What’s up?”

His voice is an attempt to be hard, but it flutters, warbles on the words.

Amy sucks in a breath. She can’t overthink it. So she curls her fingers into her palms until she feels her nails bite and starts talking.

“Honesty, right? That’s what we agreed. And I know we’re not-” that’s where the words catch in her throat, burning her, and she blinks tears back to force them out “- not together now but I figure we still promised to tell each other everything. Right? So. I’m telling you.”

Ty says nothing, but his weight rocks from one hip to the other, and restlessness crawls visibly up his spine with the way his shoulders move and his mouth twists.

“There is-” she can’t enhance it enough “ _nothing_ going on between me and Chase. He kissed me once. That’s it. I was on some adrenaline high and that’s the only reason it even happened. I regret it, not just because of the part it had in you and me but just for myself I regret it.”

“You followed him today,” Ty points out. “At the pool hall. Thought you said you were avoiding him.”

There’s a kind of accusation in that, one that he’s only half asked, but it’s also a softening, an opening for an explanation rather than condemnation. Amy forces herself to keep breathing, to not rise up and argue it. She’s here to tell him everything.

“Dexter is a special horse, okay. And my dad is treating him like a walking dollar sign. He- Ty if he races in this he could end up as a chuck wagon pony and be lame in six months. They’ll kill him because he wouldn’t be worth the feed to keep him. He’d be dead. Or in six months he could have a new life as a hunter-jumper. I guess I just hoped he meant more to my dad than that, but I wish I was more surprised.

“I’m telling you this because – that’s what it means to me, okay? I don’t want to see him end up that way. And Chase offered a way out.”

Ty rocks away, throwing his head back. “Yeah, he did, Amy. And why do you think?”

“I know why!” Amy throws back at him, feeling the clawing antagonism of it all like twisting knots in her veins. “I know he’s doing it for himself.”

“No, he’s not,” Ty protests, but he sounds defeated, exasperated. “He’s doing it because it’s a way to you.”

“I know that,” Amy says quietly. “I do. That’s- that’s what I mean. It’s self-serving. He didn’t say it out of the goodness of his heart and that’s why I followed him. He said it like that because he likes the showmanship of it; the attention he gets from being dramatic. And he does it because he knows it gets under your skin.”

Ty’s expression drops and his eyebrows shoot up under his hair in disbelief. “Seriously? Yeah I wonder why – He kissed my girlfriend. He kissed you, Amy. Sorry if his existence makes me want to punch him.”

“No, I know. I get that,” Amy reluctantly concedes. “I don’t like it when people resort to fists but I get it. I’m just saying. He knows it too so he uses it. He knew you couldn’t claim on Dexter; he did it to cause problems.”

“He’s an asshole,” Ty mutters, and Amy isn’t wholly sure she was meant to hear it, but she did, so she exhales and shrugs in agreement.

“Yeah.” And then she carefully continues, “Anyway that’s why I followed him. I wanted to know what he wanted out of it.”

“And what is that?” Ty asks, voice turning cold. “Another kiss?”

“ _No_ ,” Amy says, almost before he’s finished asking it, viscerally recoiling from the thought alone. It makes her feel distorted and wrong in her own body even as she knows that Chase may not have asked for that exactly, but what he did ask for had already lead to that outcome once. It wasn’t a long shot to guess he was after the same thing again. Amy winces. “He said... he’d only claim on Dexter if I agreed to do clinics with him again. Then said it was my choice.”

She wants to rant about that; the fact that he’s trying to pit her love for Dexter against her like this but it’s not like she didn’t expect it of him and Ty isn’t someone who’d be sympathetic of it.

Ty’s eyes are hurt and angry, his jaw ticking. He knows just as well as she does that the first clinic was what really started this. His hands pull from his pockets so he can fold them over his chest; all he has to protect the fragile heart beating between his ribs, under layers of fibre. “It is your choice,” he agrees flatly.

Amy blinks. _Does he really think-_ “I’m not going to do it,” she says, voice pitching high. “I told you; I’m avoiding him at all costs. I don’t like his methods and I really don’t even like him right now so there’s no way I’d even think about agreeing to this-”

“Not even for Dexter?” Ty asks, an honest question but with a scathing bite to it. Because of course he also knows exactly what Chase is doing by leveraging Dexter. “You love that horse, Amy.”

“I love you, too,” she bursts back at him before her throat closes up. Ty blinks, wordless. It’s armour, Amy reminds herself sharply. Just armour. He’s hurt too. She breathes through it. Honesty and trust don’t happen on their own, they have to be worked at. So she shakes her head, lifts her gaze and looks him in the eyes.

“If I did it would hurt you, and I don’t want to do that any more. I never did. So no. I’m not willing to chance that it would even work if that’s what I’d be risking.”

“You said you weren’t giving up on him without a fight,” Ty reminds her, his voice catching and off-guard. It sends Amy back to the barn just hours earlier; the harsh cut of her own words and the way she’d left him behind in the lancing streaks of sunlight, Spartan trailing at her shoulder like a silent guardian.

“I’m not,” she says. “But I’ll find another way. This isn’t it. Chase definitely isn’t it. And hurting you isn’t either.”

The driveway feels suddenly too silent when the both of them are done talking. Spartan tugs idly at stalks of overgrown grass through his bit without making a sound. The trailer is quiet, too, and Amy wonders whether Ashley and Caleb are listening at the door or if they’re determinedly trying not to hear them. The thought that they might have heard is a little daunting, scarily exposing. It feels less important when she focuses on Ty and sees the chilly stiffness has drained out of him, but it’s still a gnawing thing in her bones.

He listened to her, but now she feels out of place just hovering in the driveway so she backs up. Ty’s eyes snap up to her as he registers the retreat.

“I’m going to go,” Amy says, jerking her thumb awkwardly back in Spartan’s direction. “But just- this was me telling you. There’s really nothing going on, there never will be. I just don’t want to lose Dexter and I was angry he offered like that. And I’m sorry.”

She backs up two more steps before Ty moves. His arms unfold and he jumps off the decking, striding out towards her and lurching to a stop just out of arm’s reach. His eyes are suddenly blown, and he looks strangely winded, like he’s out of breath.

“You said being honest, right?” he asks, words tripping as they rush out and Amy realises he’s psyching himself up to say this.

She nods.

“Do you hold Blair against me? Really?” Ty asks, nervous tension fraying his voice. “Because I need to know. Because if you do then I don’t know where we can go from here.”

Amy wants to yell no straight away. The thought that this could be what breaks them, leaves them teetering unable to move forward or go back is terrifying, but she owes him more with this – a question he was as scared to ask as she is to answer – than to be thoughtless.

So she steadies her breathing for a second, realises she’s matching it to Ty’s as they both draw on each other, and then opens her mouth.

“I don’t hold her against you,” she says, soft, quiet, now that the gap between them is small enough to handle it. “I’m...it was a lot to process, finding out the way I did. And I reacted worse because it all kind of hit at once; finding out something did happen and trying to untangle that from the lies, seeing Grant go after you like that, and then she was suddenly just here and- it was a lot. There are things about her and what went down that hurt, Ty, but I believe she made all the rest up. I should have taken your side I was just-”

“Scared?” Ty suggests, and a ghost of a smile, sympathetic, like he relates, tugs at his mouth before it dissolves again.

Amy nods. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Ty says, exhaling what seems like all the air in his lungs. “So I just need you to understand for me, or at least try to – when I say that I don’t hold Chase against you. I hold him against him. I don’t like the guy and it’s not because I think something’s going on. Not really. I’ve been angry and hurt and I reacted badly. I was scared, too. Or am. I’m not sure.”

Amy frowns at the tense correction. “You don’t have to be.”

Ty’s expression pulls bleakly and when he speaks, it’s with blunt honesty. “I’m in love with you, Amy, and the guy that kissed you knowing you were with me is hanging around town and offering to save a horse you love to get close to you. He knows what he’s doing. And I know I don’t own you but I never had anything in my life that I ever wanted to keep until you were in it. So yeah. I’m scared.”

His breath blows out with the end of the confession like he’s freed himself from the leaden weight of it. Amy’s heart turns over, pulses fever-bright in the cool dusk and her nerves fray.

She’s scared of that, too.

Ty might be afraid that she’ll walk away; that she’ll drift in with a hotshot cowboy, or a talented showjumper even though she knows it won’t happen; not like that, but she’s just as worried that he might get in his truck one day and hit the road. She isn’t the only one who has options, not now that he’s going to school, that he has a GED and his probation days are long done. His future is wide open. Not just when it comes to relationships; but leaving Hudson as well.

She could wake up one day to find his truck gone, his room empty, maybe not even a note left behind under the brim of a beaten up Stetson this time, either.

She thought she’d moved past it, but maybe she never did. She just doesn’t trust him to stay.

Amy sighs. A part of her misses the horses; her mind fluttering over the instinctual muscle memory of a join up and remembering her mother’s words from years ago. _Horses never lie_. They’re easy to read, they always tell the truth, she always knows where she stands. People are harder, but if it’s a choice between trying, learning, or letting Ty go right now, then that’s the easiest one there is.

“I want to keep you in my life, too,” she tells him, and she suddenly feels close to weightless. “Ty, I love you but you’re right; we can’t keep doing this.”

“So where does that leave us, then?” Ty asks, unease edging his tone. “I don’t want to be someone who’s bothered by you working with other guys-”

“Are you?” Amy’s heart lurches, and Ty swallows.

“I-...A bit,” he admits. “Maybe not so much now, but for a while. Mostly because Chase is a dick, but you told me it was you too, the adrenaline. How am I supposed to feel? I don’t want to be like that, it’s not fair on either of us, and it’s not just this crap with them, Amy. It’s when you make big decisions without even talking to me. I feel like I don’t matter, like I don’t fit into them. And you don’t trust me either or you wouldn’t have believed Grant and all the lies. Plus, tell me honestly that whenever we’ve had a fight some part of you hasn’t just been waiting for me to get in the truck and go.”

She can’t.

“We’ve got to learn to trust each other,” Amy says, a soft offering into the bite that’s laced through Ty’s voice. “Properly. Even if we have to start again. And this honesty thing...it’s something we have to learn, too. Trusting each other with the truth, all of it, no matter what. It was a good idea, just saying we would.”

“But harder in practice,” Ty agrees sadly. “It takes more than that.”

Amy tries to smile. “Yeah. So maybe let’s just...start there?”

She can already tell this will come with it’s own hurts. It’s not really a clear agreement; they’re not together any more and they can’t be until they can find a way to fix what broke, which leaves them nothing but time. A lot can change given enough of that.

“So we’re….what. Friends?” Ty asks. The word feels stilted and uncomfortable. She doesn’t like it; already misses him and everything that it leaves behind.

“We’re….trying,” Amy decides, unable to land on something that fits better.

Ty lets out his breath slowly, and then nods with the barest rocking of his head. “Okay. Good.”

“Okay,” Amy repeats, for lack of anything else. It feels too quiet again, suddenly, far too many words littering the ground between them, coloured with the off-kilter sensation of trying to start over even though lack of love isn’t what broke them apart. It’s a squeezing pressure on her chest, a pulsing in her blood and a dizziness in the back of her head.

Honesty is just as daunting as she’d thought, but she hadn’t quite been ready for the way it’s left her drained, too. She’s suddenly exhausted and sleep feels worlds closer now than it did when she was sitting on her bed replaying the last angry conversation she and Ty had shared.

“I have to...” she gestures back towards Spartan and Ty almost startles in his haste to nod and agree.

“Yeah-yeah, um- stay safe, okay?”

“I will,” she promises, and Ty doesn’t follow her when she retreats.

Spartan’s head lifts as she reaches him, a soft, soulful whicker quivering through his nostrils as she tugs his rein free of the gate rail.

He can feel the change in her, there’s no way he wouldn’t; the frenetic energy she’d tacked him up with all gone. She throws the rein over his neck and swings herself up onto his back with a soothed if uncertain weariness. The familiar worn leather of the saddle is grounding, so is the way he yields between her legs and into her fingers. The Morgan gelding shifts on his hooves, stones crunching underneath them and warmth rising up through his thickening black coat. When she puts the inside of her calf to his ribs to steer him around, she can feel his heartbeat through her jeans.

“Hey, Amy.”

She looks up, distracted from the way Spartan steps underneath himself and breathes deep, ready to go.

Ty steps closer, hands back in his pockets. His hair sweeps across his forehead and the shadowed shape of him against the almost gone light behind the trailer is soft and loose.

“I told her it was never going to happen.”

Amy frowns, trying to place it. When she realises he means Blair she expects to feel the same old hollowing coldness take root in her chest, like it did when the girl first showed up on the back of Ty’s bike, like all the moments after. It doesn’t, though. It’s just a ripple of remembered hurt that washes out as she breathes.

“What wasn’t?” she asks, stilling Spartan underneath her.

Ty just meets her eyes and says evenly, “Me and her. She asked if there was ever anything for me, or if there could have been. I said no and I meant it. And I’m sorry, too.”

He stops talking, lets it sink in. Warmth has spilled through Amy’s bloodstream, flourishing despite the evening chill that’s starting to settle and she finds that there’s certainty in her head as she watches Ty stand and wait in the streaky light in front of her.

“I know,” she says finally, because even if convincing her heart to move forward is a work in progress, she knows for certain that they’re both sorry. It seems as good a place as any to pick up from another day. “I’ll see you,” she nods, reining Spartan around. “Can you say thanks, to Ashley and Caleb?”

A small smile, one just touched with his usual amusement, settles on Ty’s face as he nods. “Sure. Though they’ve probably been listening.”

Amy had suspected as much, and she feels her mouth tug with an answering smile. That doesn’t feel quite so terrifying now.

“And if I can do anything to help with Dexter short of finding five grand, then tell me, okay?” he says. “I want to help.”

“I will,” she agrees, heart warm and pulsing against the cage of her ribs. Even when they’ve been at odds, or when it’s a stupid decision, he’s always tried to come through for her. And now they’re both stalling so she clicks her tongue determinedly. “Goodnight.”

Spartan tosses his head and skips forwards into a trot, striding out off the dirt between the cars and brushing back into the long grass on the hill the way they came. Amy doesn’t look behind her; doesn’t want to have the shrinking view of Ty by the trailer to miss even more. She sets her eyes up the road, gives Spartan his head and lets him break into a lope as he picks his way home across the moors.

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously where is the fandom for this show? 
> 
> I also find it hilarious that I've been dying to write about horses again since I started my re-watch and instead the first thing I write is this - which barely has Spartan in it (and didn't at all originally). One day, maybe. But I love writing about people and exploring psychology so this was fun anyway (and hugely improved from early attempts).


End file.
